Next year, school will be starting at 8:35 a.m. and will be concluding at 4:05 p.m. The Board of Education has chosen to do this due to the fact that high schoolers will benefit from this shifted start time. They feel like adding an extra hour in the morning will allow students to get caught up on the sleep that we are all lacking. So will this new start time help or hurt the lives of high schoolers?

Since our release time is being pushed later, this means that all extracurricular activities will be moved back along with it. Practices and rehearsals will start later, which means they’ll end later. Students with jobs will be forced to push their schedules back as well, resulting in a loss in working hours, and loss of money. In turn, this will cause everyone involved to be getting home at a much later time. Our homework will then push our sleep schedules to later times.

Since we will be getting done with our homework much later, and thus waking up later, I think our sleep schedules will remain pretty much the same. We’ll be getting the same amount of sleep as before, possibly less.

The goal of giving us more sleep in the mornings was one of the goals of the Board due to the multiple experiments conducted that prove that high schoolers who sleep more obtain better grades on standardized tests and do better in school than kids who aren’t getting enough sleep.

However, with our dismissal time pushed back as well, we won’t be finishing homework as early as we were before. We will be getting to bed even later than before which will make it so we are getting the same amount of sleep as we previously were.

The Fall 2019 schedule won’t help or hurt high schoolers. Our lives will remain very much the same despite the attempted changes to our sleep schedules that have been made by the Board of Education.